Owning and Governing Virtual Communities


Edward A. Cavazos, Interliant, Inc.
Jon Lebkowsky, EFF-Austin
Gail Ann Williams, The WELL: Gail's Speaker Notes.
Panel for CFP '98

How are virtual communities governed?

And how does community governance relate to ownership of infrastructure, brand and liability?

Social cyberspace and online community was a phenomenon largely associated with mailing lists, freely distributed USENET groups and hobby bulletin board systems prior to the explosion of the World Wide Web in the last five years. "Virtual Community" is now said in the same breath with "venture capital," and is being promoted to investors as a killer app for driving traffic to commercial web sites.

High-stakes investment aside, the infrastructures for these increasingly elaborate systems have rising costs, especially those costs associated with hardware and software evolution and maintenance, technical and support staff, content provision and customer acquisition. These costs are met in various ways; usually through the development of multiple profit centers: banner ads, subscription costs, WWW publishing or other Internet services, user data resale, etc.

Participants in an online community may find that their freedom of expression and personal data privacy have become commodities offered by the site provider. This leads to a sometimes tense relationship between the user community and the commercial aspects of infrastructure and growth, even on systems which are essentially or explicitly cooperative.

Five years ago, at the third CFP, Mike Godwin of the Electronic Frontier Foundation suggested that those people already spending time building virtual communities might be "our first resources when we begin to figure out what kinds of online communities can function, and what kinds of laws and institutions we need to accommodate them."

At that time, in early 1993, no web addresses had ever appeared in television ads, and the concept of "cyberspace" as a meeting place was limited to a tiny fraction of the population. Since then, online communities have burgeoned and become imaginable even to those who don't participate. Their members display many attributes of civic stakeholders, and may experience changes in offerings or policies as censorship or as a denial of their rights to assemble. In turn, they have sometimes employed organized sabotage, coordinated exodus and relentless filibuster when requests for changes in policy, functionality or interface have been ignored by service providers.

We will discuss issues of governance, user rights and calls for autonomy, with case studies from communities such as the WELL, Electric Minds, and the River (a cooperative).

Watch for additional notes and resources at this site.